The Traditional Style
of the Crime-Victim
Narrative
Violence is one of humankind’s oldest story themes, dating back to the early epics. Common to the American cultural heritage and to its folk tradition are narratives that emphasize not only violence but criminal behavior—tall tales of Wild West shootouts, ballads about criminals’ last farewells, legends of horrific murders, and sagas about notorious outlaws, for example.1 This focus on crime and violence continues in contemporary oral tradition. Today, information about serial murderers wanted by the FBI, repeat offenders, or crime victims can be found in every metropolitan American newspaper. Folklore about crime may seem ubiquitous, but what appears to be a contemporary fascination with such stories is actually part of a long-standing and distinctive American tradition.2
Human adventure is at the heart of all narrative expression. How these experiences are channeled into a creative outlet such as storytelling is certainly a puzzle for folklorists. Contemporary folklorists no longer question that storytelling is a social activity. Stories are shared because they are pleasurable to hear, and enable both narrators and audience to achieve distance from the everyday world, a world filled with hardship, frustration, and anxiety. For example, humorous tales allow us to separate ourselves from our own foibles and fallibilities and to laugh at them. One of life’s greatest pleasures is to be able to entertain others and to be entertained in turn. But stories about personal experiences also provide information about cultural and social rules for living. In the folk tradition, narrators who tell personal-experience stories, or participate in enacting other folklore forms, usually work within a specific framework. Because they may choose words, phrases, diction, formulae, and performance styles, the mode of presentation is their own. However, narrators are conditioned by and restricted to what is traditionally accepted within their own culture. A text or story can become traditionalized in one of two ways: by folk cultural material that is handed down by word of mouth, and by the oral replication of a text identifiable by its distinctive stylistic features and structure.3
A newly discovered group of texts that have a distinctive, recognizable, and repeatable structure and characteristics, and are traditional to a particular milieu may constitute a new genre of folklore. Here the term genre is used to denote a classification in which the features of style and structure for the crime-victim narrative are analyzed. The dramatic and narrative qualities that traditionalize the crime-victim story raise an important question. How does a contemporary story, specifically the crime-victim narrative, become traditionalized? What features of style and structure characterize these urban personal-experience stories as traditional?4
Crime-victim narratives have several stylistic features that provide a dramatic structure and resolution. These stories are characterized by step-by-step action leading to the resolution. The insertion of role-playing dialogue between the characters, the lack of repetition of narrative scenes (a singular departure from the pattern of much traditional material), and the emphasis on details important to the plot and narrative asides are typical features. Like the urban legend, the crime-victim narrative is told for truth (though it differs from newspaper accounts about crime); characterization is limited, and the setting is the real world, not the world of fiction.
TRADITIONAL FEATURES
General Characteristics
The crime-victim narrative centers around conflict between two or more people, usually strangers. The stories are most often told as singular episodes in a string of recounted personal narratives about city life. Crime-victim stories are intensely dramatic. They draw attention to the immediate situation of the moment in the story frame. Consequently, they catch the listener’s attention right from the start. The narrator usually begins with the time and place of the event. A conflict arises and is resolved, most often with the offender fleeing the scene of the crime, although occasionally the victim calls the police. A coda, ending the story, often suggests certain attitudes towards life in New York City or about crime in general. A declaration of faith in people may be expressed, such as when a stranger helps a wounded victim, but more often a cry of frustration about urban life ends the story. Just the mere threat of violence or the perception of its potential may create the dramatic tension within the narrative. Narrative content and dramatic delivery add tension to the story, as well.
Crime-victim stories rarely contain graphic descriptions of violence, as are frequently found in other forms of American folklore.5 Though it is presumed that violence characterizes the stories, the violence is sanitized. Few lengthy depictions of physical harm or abuse appear; however, when present, violence is frequently denoted by action verbs as shoot, kick, beat, hit, or jump. These words are often said in a matter-of-fact tone. Depicting graphic scenes of gratuitous violence is not the main purpose in relating these stories. Nor is violence celebrated as a means to an end. For the victim and for the tellers, survival and perseverance are more important qualities.
The Steady Progression of Action: Synchronic Time
The crime-victim story develops similarly to other oral narratives: by repetition and a recognition of a story-building structure. Crime-victim stories do not have repeated narrative sections or patterned sequences of threefold repetition as do traditional folk narratives. But these stories do have openers, like the folk tale’s opening formula of “Once upon a time.”6 For example, a teller might say, “Here’s one I’ve heard,” or enter narrative competition with, “Oh I can top that one!” or “I’ve got a better one.” These openers imply that similar events have already been heard, and that tellers and audiences know about them; and, more important, that stories of this type will be heard in the future. After all, city life is commonly defined by these narratives.
The plot of the crime-victim story unfolds logically, following a steady path of action. It can therefore develop quickly, satisfying the listener’s curiosity about what happens to the characters. The teller is not overly concerned with the criminal’s motivation per se, or even with his or her techniques, though both are essential to the development of the story. It is the resolution of the conflict and the unfolding of how the victim survived that are crucial. The victim’s fate is the key to the dramatic quality of the story. Because of an identification with the victim, even the most poorly told yet clearly vicious story seems to be remembered.
The crime-victim story begins with little introduction to the event itself or to its characters. The narratives themselves might be used as conversational icebreakers. This is because tellers and audience share a common frame of reference. They assume that there is no escape from crime in the city world. Thus, lengthy preliminaries are not necessary, except for outsiders, newcomers to New York City. As the story begins, listeners are not provided with clues about what happens to the victim, or the events that lead up to the incident. Sometimes, the individual characters are familiar; the victim and the narrator are often one and the same. But victims in these stories can also be strangers. Consequently, biographical details are few. In an Aristotelian way, personalities are revealed by action within the story.
Action is essential to the progression of the plot. Background details are insignificant. In fact, excessive detail would only hinder the narrative’s flow. Because of the insistence upon “what happened next,” the story’s dramatic themes are implicitly revealed. As the story unfolds, familiar themes surface. These might include the offender’s boldness or audacity, the offender’s exercise of power, the threat to life, the physical danger to the victim, the victim’s panic or fear, the loss of property, and the violation of personal space.
After reminding the audience that the story can be one of a probable string of stories about urban life, the narrator focuses immediately on the location of the incident, grounding it in time and space and establishing its veracity. In effect, the world of the story becomes real, having recognizable and familiar places and scenes—for example, the New York City Public Library (M-54), Morningside Park (M-17), or Manhattan’s Upper West Side (M-53). Once the teller thus “localizes” or personalizes the environment, he or she focuses on the chain of events that lead to a resolution. For example, when Stanley Wolman told a story about his grandmother, he was responding to my question of whether he had heard of anyone being mugged. First he said, “I’m sure I’ve heard some stories.” Then, pausing, he recalled a specific incident. He exclaimed, “Oh, yeah, my aunt has a loft on West Seventeenth Street. My grandmother comes over a lot. She comes over to see them once in a while . . .” (M-5). But immediately after his short “introduction,” Wolman locates the core of the story. His grandmother had been tied up and locked in a basement closet by two intruders and was later discovered by his aunt. Few details about the grandmother are presented in the story, but the listeners and perhaps Wolman himself now ascribe a new identity to her—crime victim. He begins by relating the place and time of the event, provides the scantiest of details about his relatives, then emphasizes the most important part of the story—that his grandmother made it through the ordeal. Her survival serves as resolution to the story.
The characters themselves, whether victims or bystanders, have no fully developed qualities or personalities. In another example, Marcia Bobson reports the place and the time of an incident. Like other narrators of these stories, she tells little about what she was doing right beforehand. She reports that she was walking down a Manhattan street when several “guys” harassed her, and one attempted to molest her. She said anxiously, “I was walking crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street East, and I was right on 250 West Fifty-seventh Street. There were some guys taking stuff into a building, and it looked like a delivery.” Marcia continued, “And before I knew what was happening, he was molesting me.” She resisted and swung back, smacking the man on his ear with her purse. She then fled to her apartment a few blocks away, immediately telling her husband what had happened. During our interview, Marcia mentioned that even though they had lived in Chicago for several years, nothing like this unprovoked attack had ever before happened to her. Here again, in Marcia’s story, the focus is on the action—we aren’t given a clue to why she was on that street in the first place, or whether any other event precipitated the incident. She did mention to me during our interview that she began carrying a can of condensed soup in her purse for several months after the incident to “thwart” anyone who would dare to approach her again (M-40).
Victims, and even witnesses, have surprising stories to tell. For example, one summer evening, Ellen Schwartz witnessed a violent rape from her bedroom window. “Then there is the thing that happened across the street from me. Last July, the end of July. It was almost a year ago.” She paused and then continued, “I think it was July twenty-third.” She nodded her approval at her precise recall of detail, as she spoke into my tape recorder in an Upper West Side luncheonette.7 “It was four-thirty in the morning,” she continued (R-9). As she spoke, she unfolded a lengthy, horrifying account of a man who attacked and then attempted to rape a neighbor after breaking into her second-floor apartment. He entered through an open window, boosting himself up onto a garbage can. The night was hot, a New York scorcher. The woman had left the window open for some air. The man had been seen lurking around the neighborhood. Ellen herself had seen him and even had complained once or twice about him to the police. On that eventful summer night, Ellen just couldn’t sleep. Absent-mindedly, she glanced out of her window and witnessed the surprising scene. At first, she was unclear about what was going on. “And I said to myself, ‘Hold on, now, you’re too liberal; just because he is fully dressed and she is in her nightgown and he is beating the shit out of her doesn’t mean that they don’t know each other and they don’t like it that way.’ I mean, you just can’t scream rape at four o’clock in the morning in New York.” But then she realized that the woman was in distress. Ellen leaned out of her window and screamed across the early dawn street to her: “Is everything all right?” She put the police whistle she was holding in her hand into her mouth, blew it loudly, and alerted the neighborhood: “STOP RAPIST!” she hollered. Discovered, the man leapt off the now half-clad woman, slipped out the apartment window, and fled down the street. A few minutes later, the battered and bruised victim was in Ellen’s apartment talking with the police and thanking her for intervening. Ellen was to learn later that the precinct switchboard had “lit up like a Christmas tree” because of her cry of alarm.
Such stories are set in common urban places—apartment lobbies, eleavators, vestibules, subways, buses, the open street. The locales provide another way to highlight the story action. But because the settings are so ordinary, victims and nonvictims, narrators and listeners, are apt to reevaluate their environments after an incident occurs. Ellen, for example, wondered if she should move from her now “dangerous” neighborhood to a “safer” one.8 Precisely because the events of the stories occur in such common places, these settings suddenly become the scene for everyday drama. The elevator becomes the danger room, the city street the murder place, the subway car the den of thieves.
The Central Characters
Crime-victim narratives generally have three main characters: the victim (hero/heroine), the offender (villain), and the occasional witnesses or bystanders to the scene. The victim and the bystanders are inert characters; though they might act heroically, they are not heroes or heroines in the true sense. The victim is acted upon, and the bystanders, when they do appear, watch the action. It is the offender who provokes the action and is the most active of the characters.
Because the primary intention of the narrator is to get to the resolution of the story, he or she lingers only on significant details or actions, since an impatient audience might wonder about the victim’s fate, and consequently the teller would lose their attention. As a result, the characters in these stories of modern life are one-dimensional and lack development. As with the common characters of the urban legend, their personality traits are superficial. For example, the victims in urban legends are often foolish or naive. In the crime-victim story, the victims are not only naive but also frightened, vulnerable, and at times unusually trusting of others. They are unaware of the dangers surrounding them. We never see them as rounded, complex people who are motivated by psychological reasoning. They never seem to wonder why urban crime exists, or how the crime rate can be decreased, or what the consequences and costs of crime are to society. The victim characters in these stories are caricatures of urban life—the common person of the city street. For the most part, they represent relatives, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, i.e., our social network. But the characters need to be abstractions, because the intention of most narrators is to bring the conflict to its conclusion as swiftly as possible and arrive at the coda—the point of the story. For example, the English teacher who was robbed at gunpoint in front of her students is unfortunately less significant to the audience as an individual victim than as a symbol of the decline of discipline and the increase of violence in inner-city schools.
Like the victims, the bystanders are inert characters. They simply witness the conflict, rarely intervening to rescue the victim from harm. Their function is to represent the apathetic citizen, common in urban stories. While bystanders play a benign role in the stories, they are usually criticized by the listeners, who expect or wish them to help the victim. In several stories, the bystanders are policemen. Their appearance often prompts a listener to say, “Where is a cop when you need one?”
The offenders, or villains, in the story are the most active of the three central characters. Along with victims and bystanders, they are described quickly in bland terms. In most of the stories I collected, the alleged offender is a young black male. He may be “just a guy,” or a “black kid,” or a “young black dude.”9 Such standard designations are particularly powerful, because in several cases the narrators stereotype these characters by assuming they are offenders with past criminal records. Common terms such as “a black kid” or “a young black dude” are often synonymous with racial slurs, equating young black males with persistent troublemakers. The offender isn’t around long enough to make a personal impression. The victim has a more lasting impression of the incident itself than of the figures involved in it. Occasionally, offenders are identified by occupational labels: the security guard, the elevator operator, the policeman. But they still remain one-dimensional characters. Thus, the emphasis is less on the relationship between the characters than on the action between them.
Emphasis on the Climactic Scene and the Economy of Suspense
Crime-victim stories seem purposely short and staccato—quickly charged, urban, and fast-paced—resembling life in the city in which they are set. Like the urban motorist who wants to get from one place to another in the shortest time using the most lightly traveled streets, these stories have few detours.
Soon after the abstract characters are introduced, the teller comes to the story’s most powerful moment: the confrontation between the soon-to-be-victim and the perpetrator of the crime. When the story first begins, only the narrator knows the outcome—whether the victim will live or die, whether the offender will be captured or flee. The audience has only a few clues as to the story’s direction. The interest lies in how the narrator creates suspense for effect and how it is used to bring the audience into the circle. For example, when Bernadette crosses the busy street to get the key to return home, we have little idea of the rape scene that will be shortly presented. When a Brooklyn woman returns home from vacation and is met by a “friendly stranger” who helps her to her door, we have no clue that he will later assault her. The audience has been brought into the story much as a bystander would be. In the climactic scenes, the offender and the victim may negotiate. The victim might try to humor the offender or pretend to misinterpret his directions or the seriousness of the situation; however, this attempt to thwart victimization is not always successful.
As a bystander to the unfolding of the plot, the listener is caught up in a sense of intrigue similar to that evoked by reading a good murder mystery. Of course, the plots of crime-victim stories are simple to follow and certainly less convoluted than those of many mystery stories or television detective shows. Nevertheless, the listener is intrigued by the story, and is both curious and often gullible. At first, he or she is an unwitting participant—“Oh, this could never happen to me!” Yet as the story continues and the setting and situation seem more common, listeners are transported into the victim’s world, realizing when the climactic scenes are reached that such things could indeed happen to them. The identification with the victim is one reason that these stories about urban life are so popular. The audience’s identification, at first negligible, becomes stronger by the story’s end. Although the roles of each character are not clear at the beginning of the story, they are clarified quickly. Sides are taken. Themes in the story that are defined as “incidents” at the beginning unfold as stylized tales by their conclusion.
Narrative Asides
Asides are a common feature in oral narratives, and they figure widely into these personal-experience stories. The purpose of this device is to call attention to the events within the narrative, and to further elaborate on its point. Crime-victim stories include four uses of narrative asides. For example, a narrator might embroider a story, evaluating or commenting on his or her role as the victim in the story; however, these comments break the narrative flow and appear outside of the story. Often, narrators comment on how the story events affected them: “I never thought this could happen to me.” In another type of narrative aside, the narrator evaluates how others acted in the victim situation. This type of aside also stops the flow of the story.10
This happened a couple of years ago. There was a teacher at my school. . . . She wasn’t teaching there. It was his wife. I think she was at home, and somebody came into her apartment and wanted to rob it. He found her at home, and he got scared. And instead of just running, he beat her to death. And the husband found her in a pool of blood. . . . He found her just like that. That freaks me out, because that’s someone that I know. I know him. . . . this happened when I first started to teach in the school, and we got along with each other pretty well. And they were so happily married. Real together. They never got the guy. (MR-6)
The above story clearly indicates the use of narrative asides. The narrator, Mary Simmons, implies how vicious the offender was, but she comments primarily on her association with the victim’s husband and how that association affected her. Like most other narrators, she embeds the asides into the story. Narrative asides rarely appear as openers, since listeners need a frame of reference to understand why the teller needs or wants to make the point. As in Simmons’s story, this device is frequently used to suspend the story’s action. Furthermore, the aside appears right before the coda: “They never got the guy.”
In these stories, one of the most common types of narrative aside is internal: the frequent use of dramatized dialogue within a story. In the traditional ballad, a story told in song, dialogue is often the vehicle that reveals the conflict between the principal characters.11 Urban legends—contemporary stories about unusual or unexplainable events, such as finding a mouse in your coke, or dipping into a bucket of fried chicken and coming up with a rat instead of a drumstick—often use dialogue to add verisimilitude, as “evidence” that the event in question could indeed have happened. Like the ballad and the urban legend, the folktale also uses dialogue to make the characters of the fictional world come to life, and to have the hero solve his dilemma through interactions with the story characters. All such forms of folklore, particularly the ballad, use dialogue to slow down and focus on the story line. In the crime-victim story, dialogue is used in the same way. It provides the stage for the subsequent resolution—whether or not the character victim survives the event.
Using dialogue in a “true story” is another way in which the narrator, eyewitness, or victim, or even second- or third-hand reporters, can “claim” the story. Tellers can also inject their own personal style into these accounts.12 They can speed up the narration to a dramatic point and infuse it with a sense of immediacy and action. Or they can incorporate New Yorkisms into their stories by using common colloquial expressions such as “like,” “you know,” and “ya know what I mean?” to extend the action. Like other narrators, they can use their voices to instill a sense of fear, use facial mannerisms to express excitement, surprise, or horror, or use hand gestures or body posture to act out the story. A good storyteller is often a good actor. For example, Irene Whitefield role-played each character when relating her story. She showed me how she grabbed a man’s hand while he was dipping his fingers into the purse of the woman in front of him, as he and his victim were going around in the revolving door of the New York City Public Library (M-54). Dialogue enables the teller to create a brief urban drama. It conveys a certain perspective on urban reality, telling the audience what the reporter believes to have happened. Because these events are so often spoken, their components are a part of a traditional urban folk conversation. Dialogue gives the story some punch, infusing it with a sense that “you are there.” Dialogue can often add a comic touch to the dramatic scene, especially when the tension is high and has been sustained for several minutes.
In these stories, the teller prepares others for what they might expect in a time of crisis. It is interesting that even when there is no face-to-face interaction between a victim and an offender within the story scene, reporters might fashion conversations between other characters who could be involved in the event. Informants did tell me stories about house robberies that are not included in this collection; however, in telling, the informants created conversation—for example, a dialogue between a victim and a locksmith changing locks on a newly burgarized apartment might be included in the story.
Here’s an example of how dialogue is used as an aside and is deftly incorporated into a story. One late evening, Joe Bowers, an actor living in New York City, was heading home. He was walking down East Eleventh Street off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village to the subway. He had just spent a quiet evening with a friend watching television. “I was just walking down the street going to the IRT subway to catch my train to go home. I was walking down the street. . . . I was kind of watching the sidewalk, because you have to in New York,” he chuckled, and then cupped his palm over his mouth and giggled nervously. “Anyway, so I was walking down the street, and I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around me.” Joe noticed a man walking toward him on the same side of the street. To avoid a collision, Joe sidestepped left.13 “All of a sudden,” Joe continued, “he jumped in front of me into my path.” Looking menacing and vicious, the man held a club up over Joe’s head. Then, with his other hand, he pointed a knife at his belly. He now towered over Joe, a mere five-foot-five. The armed man spoke: “Don’t say anything, just give me your money.” Frightened, Joe replied to him, “Sure, here.” Joe reached down into his pocket and handed over a few dollars. Still not satisfied by the meager haul, the threatening man shouted another demand, “Give me all of it!” “Sure,” said Joe after digging into his pocket and then slapping some pennies into the man’s hand. “There it is, that’s everything.” But the greedy man demanded more: “Give me your watch!” Joe again acquiesced: “Here, sure. There you go.” The offender, finally satisfied, started to run down the street. He turned and yelled out one more demand: “All right, now just keep going and don’t look back.” At first, Joe was a bit stunned, since the incident happened so quickly. Then he curtly said to the man, “Okay, goodnight.” He then bolted for the subway stop, clutching a saved subway token in his hand. “I wanted to get home,” he explained. (M-19).
This example contains many of the essential elements of the classic crime-victim narrative. Joe meets the stranger after dark on an otherwise well-traveled Manhattan street. At first, he is almost undaunted by the situation, as suggested by the blasé tone he uses to tell his story. “Sure, here it is,” he says when he gives in to the demands of the man. His delivery of the deadpan dialogue is almost casual. Joe is the jaded New Yorker par excellence. His cynicism and nonchalance conceal how frightened he is by the experience. His perfectly controlled actions underscore a common folk attitude: it’s only a matter of time before they get you!
The Attention to Particular Detail
Everyone likes a good story, especially a cliffhanger. One of the purposes of these crime-victim stories about city life is to enthrall and even scare the listeners, filling them with a momentary fear and uneasiness about life in New York City. To a large degree, these modern tales are replacements for the ghost stories and other scary tales that were once popularly told to amuse, frighten, and titillate.14
To create this mood of suspense and momentary danger, some narrators pay particular attention to details within the story frame, exaggerating some while eliminating others. For example, as we have just seen, through the use of dialogue, a teller can show off a flair for the dramatic. He or she may pause, take a breath, change the tone of voice, and/or incorporate gestures, all contributing to the resolution of the story. As with other traditional narratives, details that seem insignificant to the plot often change or are pared away after successive renditions, while other small details become significant. A story about an elderly couple who were beaten and robbed in their Brooklyn home one Saturday afternoon several years ago serves as an example of how details are important to the style of the crime-victim story.
“The Apartment Sale” was told by Ruth Melberg in her Brooklyn home. Once a medical secretary, Ruth was nearly sixty years old and was disabled at the time of our sessions. She passed the time with her friends and neighbors by playing card games, gossiping, and telling stories.15 She was known among them as a good storyteller, and she would often hold forth. If interrupted, she would add such comments as, “Let me finish,” or “Let me go on,” or “Come on, let me tell you what happened.” Some of her stories could last for close to thirty or forty minutes. Her narrative style is best described as “urban-combative” and aggressive. She wouldn’t hesitate to say that New York City “just isn’t what it used to be when you could go out on the streets at all hours of the night and day and not need to worry.”
Ruth’s story involved a retired couple who decided to hold a sort of urban garage sale in their apartment before relocating to a Florida condominium. They placed an advertisement in a New York newspaper. After one successful weekend, they had still more items to sell, and decided to hold a second sale. But Ruth warned them not to hold either one. Ruth said, “I warned them not to do it because I told them you don’t know who was coming into your house.” But the trusting couple ignored her warning and claimed that nothing bad could possibly happen. During the second Saturday sale, many people sauntered in and out of their home throughout the day. Around midafternoon, two buyers, a man and his son, appeared. They seemed interested in some of the merchandise. “How much would it be?” asked the father, pointing at an item. Ruth’s friends told him. The father claimed that he didn’t have enough cash for the items and asked the seller, Jesse, if they could return for them later in the day. Jesse asked him what time he could expect his return, since he and his wife, Julia, had made dinner plans for 6:00 P.M. “Oh, I’ll be back before then,” said the father. And so the two made a deal, and Jesse put the items aside, assuming the sale was made.
At five-thirty the man and his son showed up as promised and met Jesse in his apartment. Just before their dinner appointment, Julia, Jesse’s wife, left the apartment to wait on the street for their dinner companions, who were expected at six o’clock. Time passed, and the three waited anxiously for Jesse to join them, but he did not appear. “So she decided to go up and call him.” Ruth paused. She took a deep breath and went on, straightening up in her chair, puffing furiously on a Marlboro. “So,” she said slowly, “she goes upstairs to her floor, and she puts the key in the door, and just as she opened the door, her husband yells, ’Julia, don’t come in here, they’re holding me up!’ ” Ruth, with a look of fright on her face, then said, “She sees her husband with a terrible gash over his forehead.” The man and his son bound the couple, gathered their goods, opened the door, and slipped out of the building without being noticed by anyone. Ruth’s suspicion foreshadowed the moment of danger: her warning was ignored, and the violent encounter was the result. The couple were found by their friends, and the police were called, but according to Ruth, the man and his son were never apprehended. Ruth concluded: “That was another incident of people being fooled by letting strangers into their house.” Though her final comment is a summation of the story, it is the importance of the details (the buyers’ return, the dinner hour, the wife’s return) that adds to the story’s suspense.
Resolutions and Codas
Crime-victim narratives have three common and identifiable resolutions. An offender may flee the scene, like the rapist who fled from the apartment-building laundry room after confronting a potential victim (R-6). Or the victim may sneak away from his or her pursuers, as Irene Whitefield did the time she suddenly turned onto another street when being followed.16 (M-49). Or the teller may conclude the story by mentioning that the police have been called in to intervene. The story will end abruptly as if both the narrator and the listeners expect the police to “set the scene right.” Narrators are concerned about whether the offender was apprehended or if he got off “scot-free.” “They never found out who did it,” or “They never caught the guy” reiterates the teller’s vision of the city: a place where victims are preyed upon by violent urban bogeymen who are still out there.
Once the story reaches its conclusion, the teller will comment about the victim’s emotional or physical state. This discussion of the aftermath or trauma of the event is another traditional ending to the story, and its most common resolution. Tellers show sympathy for the victim, for after all, the story’s purpose is to illustrate the victim’s situation. A typical statement might be, “He was very close to being killed. It’s incredible.” (M-43), or “She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t do anything. She was just so scared” (M-78). Narrators insist on having resolutions and codas to their stories because of a human, psychological need for closure. The codas prompt the teller and the audience to reflect upon the circumstances within the story. Some change their daily behavior because of the discussed event, avoiding a particular street or neighborhood, or learning new crime-prevention techniques and incorporating them into daily routines. Some of the common codas express predictability: “Where else but New York could this happen?” or “That’s the end,” or “Isn’t it a shame!” or “You just are not safe anywhere these days” (M-65).
THE STRUCTURE OF THE CRIME-VICTIM NARRATIVE
All the narratives in the Appendix were labeled as crime-victim stories by the informants, regardless of their length. The meaning of the story does not depend on its length, structure, or stylistic features. However, as I listened to story after story, hour after hour, and analyzed the accounts in depth, it became apparent that in addition to the features described, the crime-victim narrative has a predictable pattern or structure similar to that of other forms of folklore. These stories are composed of seven identifiable units. Some of the narratives in the Appendix contain all seven units; others do not. For example, a narrator may omit a structural unit while telling a story, and continue to its coda without referring to earlier sections of the story. In other words, units are sometimes skipped, but not returned to and added later on. Some stories are longer than others; some are rather short and straight to the point. Outlined below are these seven common structural units of the crime-victim narrative.
I. Establishment of Incident
Crime-Victim Story Introduced by Narrator
1. Characters within the story are introduced.
(Type of conflict introduced—optional)
(recursive) 2. The time of the incident is announced.
｛ 3. The specific place or locale of the incident is cited.
II. Development of Action
4. Confrontation between the victim and the offender is established. Bystanders are introduced.
5. Simulated dialogue and/or negotiation, exchange of goods occurs between the victim and the offender (or details of robbery surmised). (Use of narrative asides)
III. Resolution of Crime-Victim Event
6. Incident is resolved by characters, and outcome is revealed.
IV. Coda
7. Story concludes with a coda in the form of a rhetorical question, or an evaluation about victim or urban life.
No doubt, these stories are highly predictable. To elucidate their structure, the example below has been plugged into the narrative framework. The story was collected from Bernadette Potter in July, 1977, and tells of a friend who was robbed in the least likely place in New York City—John Jay College of Criminal Justice.17
My friend Beverly [crime victim introduced; character within narrative announced] was mugged in the Police Academy, you know, on Jay Street. John Jay College of Criminal Justice [type of conflict/location of incident]. Yeah! In the lobby of the building. Well, that’s balls! [narrative aside]. It seems that whoever is supposed to watch people as they come in and out—the guard—wasn’t doing his job, and he got fired after that. Well, it seems that this bunch of kids came in, and they stopped her and one of her friends [confrontation between victim and offender; bystander introduced]. So Beverly was saying, “What are you? Crazy? We are all students here. We don’t have any money. Don’t you know what building this is?” [dialogue] The people who robbed them didn’t know where they were and took their money. Okay, whatever money they had. They only had a couple of bucks. How many students have money? [exchange] They said, “Hey, man, you must be kidding. We ain’t in there.” “Yes, you are!” [said Beverly] “Let’s get the hell out of here!” [said the muggers] One of the people had gone up and robbed one of the professors in the building [resolution]. Which goes to show you, where are you safe these days? [coda] (M-21)
Diagramming Bernadette’s narrative points out how features of style and structure are integrated and suggests that style enhances the structure. Both the particular structure of the story and its stylistic features provide the traditional framework, the flesh and bones, of these narratives. This combination of qualities “traditionalizes” these folk narratives.
TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE STRATEGIES
So far, several features that describe the stylization that occurs in the telling of the crime-victim narrative and its common structure have been examined. The strategies that narrators use to tell these crime-victim stories will now be discussed. These include the use of asides embedded in the narrative, inference and implication to draw attention to the narrative details within the story, and deduction to sketch in the details of the story that would otherwise be lost. These common strategies play an important role in elucidating the crucial differences between an oral crime-victim story and one that appears in print.
The Incorporation of Asides into the Narrative
A common narrative technique allows narrators to relinquish their role for a few moments and utter asides intended to be heard by the audience, thus directing the listeners’ attention away from the content and toward evaluation. As a result, the tellers not only align themselves with the victim in the story, but also pull the audience in to do the same. For example, “I was coming out of the subway station, and it was in the middle of the day, about 1:00 P.M. Oh, I guess it wasn’t in the spring, because it was pretty cold out. I remember that” (M-4). This confirmation of the fact during the telling is a way to emphasize that the event really did occur and to predispose the audience to accept the facts, however improbable they may be.
Tellers also make judgments about their own behavior as characters within the stories. For example, during the narration of a story, a teller might say, “So I was trapped” (M-4). Comments about one’s own behavior prior to the incident are common. “I was in a very good mood. That is always a liability in New York,” said one mugging victim while describing how she was trapped in an elevator with an armed mugger (M-23). Or, a teller may editorialize about the victim’s actions, personality, or attributes. “He never thinks about geting hurt,” one woman explained about a victimized friend (M-15). Another technique is to judge others by making assumptions summarizing their actions, presented in asides in the narrative. For example, Irene Whitefield, when sharing Joe Bower’s mugging in Greenwich Village (described earlier), said, “Joe didn’t realize it, but the guy had a cane, a walking stick, and a knife.” Joe, on the other hand, did not explain the event in the same way. While telling about a mugging victim, Ruth Melberg said, “Thank God they didn’t hurt her. I don’t know whether she lost money or not. . . . it’s a frightening experience” (M-34).
These three uses of asides in the story are ways to create a strong bond between the narrator and the listeners. While the teller and the audience may infuse the story with different meanings, it is the teller who can persuade the audience to attribute the same meaning to the stories through the use of asides. The teller can encourage sympathy for the victim, express an understanding of the precariousness of being the targeted victim, and guide the listener to the realization that the story about violence and its target is relevant for both teller and listener. Furthermore, the teller and the audience member may ask a common question: Who is a potential mugging victim? Editorializing in this manner is one way in which the teller can “weigh” the crime (i.e., “It wasn’t serious”) and try to come to an understanding of how violence is faced in everyday urban life.
Using Inference
Another narrative device that tellers use is inference. In this situation, the audience is provided with the barest of clues about the incident’s outcome, and they then surmise the results. Inference is often used as a psychological safety valve. For some informants, relating the event may be emotionally difficult. Some incidents are almost too terrifying to put into words and are emotionally loaded. A parallel or obvious example, in our culture, is the euphemizing of death: one buys the farm, kicks the bucket, passes on, or is laid to rest rather than dies. In the same fashion, narrators of crime-victim stories often imply the conclusions rather than state them explicitly.
Inference functions in these stories by providing tellers with a common frame of reference. The narrators imply that a particular kind of crime situation has occurred, a rape or a mugging, for example, and the audience infers the results. In the following example, neither the teller nor the audience explains directly what has occurred. This narrative was collected from Ruth Melberg as she related it to a group of her neighbors:
So, that’s nothing! A woman comes into the lobby, and she’s standing next to a colored man. He’s standing next to her. She was a little hesitant. She says, “The elevator is slow.” He says, “Yes, I’ve been waiting for about ten minutes.” She says, “What floor are you going to?” So he says, “The fifth.” She says, “Oh, I’m going to the fourth.” So the elevator comes, and he goes into the elevator. She was afraid. So she waits until he goes up to the fifth floor and then comes down, right? So she goes in, goes up to the fourth floor, and he’s waiting for her on the fourth floor! (M-36)
The implied message of the story is that one is never well enough prepared for these situations. The narrator warns about victimization in her own apartment complex, but never specifically delineates the event itself or its outcome. This stylistic strategy is a way in which both teller and audience use the narrative to meet on a common ground. The significance of these omissions and the use of inference indicate that the tellers and audience share a common frame of reference, a world view. The conclusion is not stated but is silently supplied by each party. Just as death is euphemized, so is victimization: it is expected to happen, but frightening to speak about.
Are these tales of city life true, or are they narcissistic accounts? Whether they are true or not does not diminish the fact that most people enjoy listening to a good story, especially one with which they can identify. On one level, these crime-victim narratives serve that function. The events discussed in them are often accepted as truth solely because they are so familiar, verifiable by degree. Who among a group of New Yorkers can deny hearing about a mugging or a murder? Simply put, these stories are believed to be true because they are so commonplace. The you-are-there effect, the empathy expressed for a person in danger, the human desire to see criminals “get their due,” the insistence on warnings, and the rationalizations for gratuitous violence notwithstanding are elements that provide these narratives with unquestioned plausibility.
A frequent question that arises about the veracity of crime-victim stories is how they compare to written acounts of the same events. The purpose of comparing a written with an oral crime-victim narrative is to further elaborate how the oral story takes on its own distinctive stylizations, its own distinctive flavor. Throughout this chapter, the structural pattern of the orally reported crime-victim story, its stylization, its characterizations, and the embroidery techniques used in reporting it have been examined. In order to further establish the “traditional” oral character of the collected stories, comparisons between two oral and written accounts of the same incident will be discussed.18
NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS OF COLLECTED CRIME-VICTIM STORIES
Unlike the oral narrative, the newspaper account of a crime-victim incident is relatively more detailed and formulaic. First, the journalistic formula of the who, what, when, where, and how of the events is deftly incorporated into short paragraphs of long sentences filled with concrete details. Consequently, the written story lacks the suspense on which the oral account relies. The eye-catching headline provides the resolution to the story. Second, the newspaper account stresses the facts of the event, its place of occurrence, the roles played by the offender, the victim, the eyewitnesses, and especially the police. The reporter includes information about all these participants, identifying them by name, address, age, and often by occupation, but does not editorialize about their actions or speculate about them or the role each played in the incident. However, the major difference between the oral narrative and the newspaper account is the shift away from the event’s impact on the victim towards a focus on the offender. For example, the newspaper story includes a short biographical sketch of the offender. It mentions any past criminal record and speculates on his or her motives. In general, the emphasis is on the suspect, not the victim.
Four collected narratives were corroborated with newspaper accounts. It is not surprising that so few stories were corroborated. Too many crime incidents go unreported to the police, let alone make it to the desk of a major metropolitan newspaper. And too many crime victims never tell their stories. Some events are told years later, and sometimes are confided to only a select few. Being victimized is never easy to confess. The two corroborated crime-victim stories discussed next concern sensationalized New York City murders. The written accounts attest the teller’s presentation of the event, and they also show how these oral stories differ from their written counterparts.
The first narrative is entitled “Where’s Ninth Avenue?” It was collected from Clara Gold and involves a murder in broad daylight near Herald Square in midtown Manhattan. A man came out of an Off Track Betting Office and asked directions from someone walking along the street. He then suddenly and unexpectedly shot the passerby. To Clara it seemed to be an unprovoked attack:
In October of ’73, there was a big stink in the newspapers at the time. On Thirty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, you know, there’s a Chock Full O’Nuts on the corner and a Chase Manhattan Bank further down the street. There’s an OTB [Off Track Betting Office] right next to the Chock Full O’Nuts and the Chase Manhattan Bank. . . . a guy walked out of the OTB, stopped a passerby on the street, and said, “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Ninth Avenue?” And the guy, he turned around and said, “Oh, sure. What you do is just keep walking straight for two blocks.” And the guy who asked the question said, “Thank you very much,” and he [the questioner] pulled out a gun and shot him and a couple of passersby. The cops came. There were sirens all over the place. They had the whole street cordoned off, and they finally killed the guy in the subway, you know, the platform. Do you remember that? (MR-1)
Clara’s rendition of the event clearly conforms to the common narrative structure previously outlined in these stories. The first portion of the story has its three recursive sequences. Clara introduces the time of the event (October of ’73) first, and then the locale, providing evidence in the way of a familiar landmark to ensure that a common frame of reference is shared. Then she introduces the characters, two unknown urbanites. A confrontation is suggested, though a seemingly benign one, the common situation of asking for directions on a crowded Manhattan street. Next, dialogue is interjected: “Excuse me. Can you tell me how to get to Ninth Avenue?” Suddenly, the simple everyday scene is completely turned around. A man is shot in the street.19 The story is resolved by the appearance of the police, and is completed with the coda. Clara asked her husband, Robert, who was present at the interview, if he too remembered the gruesome event. In sum, she personalized and localized the event, presented abstract characters, and stripped the story down to its basic component—the shootout at midday. She related the second-hand account in the same manner in which first-person crime-victim narratives are told.
Unlike the oral narrative of the shootout on Thirty-fourth Street, the newspaper account describes fully the sequence of events that led up to the shooting and its aftermath; it also describes the people involved, including the 200 yelling bystanders.20 While the news story lacks the suspense of the oral account—the headline anticipates the resolution—it contains flashbacks of the scenes of harrowing gunfight in broad daylight, eyewitness testimonials, full identification of the criminal involved and the request for directions, the subsequent confrontation with the passerby, the chase shootings down Thirty-fourth Street, and the resultant injuries and deaths. The newspaper report specifies the role that each person in the event played, unlike the oral account, where the characters are abstracted. In short, the newspaper account isolates the incident, singling it out as one episode from one day in the life of the city.
Just the opposite is true for the oral crime-victim account. Clara’s account, and other narratives about crime victims, stress the folk attitude that these events are common, far from unusual. The oral story exhibits the folk attitude behind the story: frustration, fear of victimization, impotence on the part of urbanites. The oral story projects a shared perspective on the everyday: it represents the worst of urban living, implying that law and order is out of hand. The oral story stresses the personal. The newspaper story stresses the impersonal, the quelling of violence, the need for maintaining law and order, and the institutions of authority that do so.
The second corroborated story is entitled “The Security Guard” (MR-13). It was collected from Ruth Melberg, during the same interview session when the “The Apartment Sale” was recorded. The story is rather horrific: a young boy is thrown off a roof by a neighborhood security guard, and his body is discovered by his mother. Below is Ruth’s taperecorded version of the gruesome tale:
Oh, I got a better one for you. Near the Coney Island Hospital there is an apartment complex. And they never had a security guard, but with all this going on the tenants got together and decided that they would hire a security guard. . . . and of course, he comes from an agency. Well, they did hire a security guard from Monday to Friday, since the man can’t work seven days a week, so he worked five days a week. Then they got this part-time security guard to work on weekends. . . . [He] was recommended by the agency.
Around the corner lived a little eight-year-old boy, and his mother comes out and says, “It’s time to come in. It’s seven o’clock.” She says, “Come in, we are going to have dinner.” He says, “I’ll have one more ride, and then I’ll come in.” So the security guard, which is the part-time man, says to her, “Oh, don’t worry about him. I’m the security guard around the corner. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t cross the street with the bicycle.” So she said, “Okay.” So the security guard enticed this little boy with the bicycle up to the roof of this six-story apartment building. He molested him and then took the little boy and threw him off the roof. And so they called the mother. Naturally, when the mother saw her little boy laying on the floor dead, there was just no consoling her. When they investigated the security guard, they found out he had a record, that he was a molester. But it seems that the agency never sent his fingerprints to Albany and that when they asked for another security guard, they were in such a hurry to fill the position so that they can get their percentage, they just didn’t bother sending his fingerprints to Albany. They recommended the next man that they had, and just unfortunately, it was this man who did have a police record. (MR-13)
In her version of the story, Ruth alleges that the security company’s hasty decision, motivated by their greed, to hire the guard without checking his references, was directly responsible for the boy’s death, which, she rationalizes, could have been prevented. She is also certain of several details that are disputed by the written account. In her story, the “weekend” guard was the murderer; yet, the day of the murder was on a Tuesday, not a Saturday or Sunday. Ruth also disclosed that the boy had been sexually abused, yet the medical examiner for the case found no such conclusive evidence. Clearly, the focus of Ruth’s narrative emphasizes the horror of the event and its tragic consequences—the mother’s discovery of her dead child. Compare this focus with the New York Post story:
A security guard was charged today with hurling a Brooklyn rabbi’s 8 year-old son to his death from the roof of a six story apartment building in Sheepshead Bay.
Lawrence Gordon, 32, was employed as a guard in the Montauk Terrace Apartment complex where Nathan Scharf was slain, according to Detective Sgt. Gerrard Wilson.
Investigative sources said Gordon had been arrested previously for child molesting and that his wife had left him a few days ago.
Brooklyn Medical Examiner Milton Wald said he had come to no conclusion about whether the victim, found naked from the waist down, had been sexually molested. He said the boy died of fractures suffered in the plunge.
Gordon was not on duty when he encountered young Scharf in the neighborhood shortly before the boy’s shattered body was found at the rear of 2885 E. Seventh Street, police said.
SERVED COMPLEX
The suspect who lives at 3054 Brighton Seventh St., Coney Island, was a part time employee of the Emergency Services Security Co., which has a contract to provide protection in the complex.
The boy’s bicycle on the roof landing of 2685 E. Seventh St. led the police to believe he had been lured there and thrown to his death, possibly after resisting sexual overtures.
Fingerprints on the bicycle and an adult’s footprint in the asphalt of the roof were two clues which helped lead to the arrest, investigators said.
Young Scharf, who lived at 731 Montauk Court, around the corner from where he had been killed, was the son of Rabbi and Mrs. Isak Scharf. He was last seen about 8 last night by his mother, Shirley.
The mother told police she had seen her son on his bicycle talking to a strange man on the street near their home. When the mother asked the man who he was he replied, “I’m all right, I’m one of the guards,” police said.
A neighbor, Mrs. Jean Weissman recalled seeing Mrs. Scharf talking to her son. “She was asking him to come upstairs,” Mrs. Weissman said. “He said he just wanted to ride his bike a few more times. . . .”21
Ruth underscored her telling of the story by insisting that the urban world is filled with untrustworthy people and unpredictable events.
In contrast to the typical newspaper accounts about crime, one significant feature of crime-victim narratives is the sanitizing of violence. One would predict that because of the overwhelming and constant portrayal of violence in the mass media, descriptions of violence would figure strongly in the stories. However, that is not the case. Informants commonly use euphemisms, such as he was “blown away,” or he was “knocked off,” or she was “ripped off,” or he was “mugged.” The last example is a slang term that could mean having one’s pockets emptied or being shot to death. The reluctance to talk about violence in a concrete way, despite the fact that these accounts are defined as crime-victim stories by their tellers, creates an interesting paradox. Just as characters are abstracted, physical settings are undistinguished, and only particular details are emphasized, violence is quickly brushed over in the story. Though tellers and their audience are fascinated by the violence within the stories, they are also repelled by it. Identifying with the violence inflicted on the victim would mean confronting one’s own vulnerability and, in turn, recognizing the gravity and possibility of being an urban target or survivor.
What conclusions can be drawn by looking at the style and structure of these tales about modern city life? Clearly, these stories are not snatches of urban folk conversations; they are structured and stylistically similar narratives about a common urban experience. For the folklorist, they provide an avenue for understanding how people shape daily experience into narratives, and, by extension, for inquiring further whether the ability to “create” stories with similar patterns, features, and structures is related to a universal human ability to fashion stories.22 Why is it that when two different people get mugged at different times on different New York street corners, their stories are amazingly similar in style and structure? By identifying the traditional nature and features of stories, we can try to understand how stories are composed and how they are used by tellers, and how newly recognized traditions play an important role in our modern lives.
The personal-experience narrative is used as a vehicle to express an individual’s or group’s distillation of experience about important events and to present that experience in a meaningful way. Because of the pervasive (and invasive) role that crime and violence play in modern society, the crime-victim narrative is the most prevalent type of personal-experience story told today. These stories are about common situations: corroboration of the events by others or by written accounts is not essential to ensure their derivation as folk narrative. Everyone has his or her own story to tell, and because so many crime events occur daily, a corpus of traditional crime-victim stories comparable to other folk stories has yet to emerge. What is traditional, that is, expected and repeated, in these crime-victim stories are the common themes, character types, and, as shown in this chapter, internal features, structure, and stylistic details. It is these features that characterize these popularly told stories of urban life.